School of Education Research Blog

By Graham Butt From 9 January, BBC 3 began broadcasting a six part series on Thursday nights called ‘Tough Young Teachers’, which follows the experiences of six graduates as they train to teach in challenging schools under the Teach First programme. Reaction from the media has been predictable – in a recent Sunday Times article titled ‘School of Hard Knocks’, Sian Griffiths  championed the cause of these beginning teachers under the strapline ‘An army of high-flying, idealistic young graduates is winning a tough battle to raise standards in some of Britain’s most deprived schools’. Depictions of the schools in which these new recruits train are uniformly bleak, as are most of the pupils they encounter; in direct contrast to the schools in which the trainees were themselves educated (Charterhouse in the case of one of the main trainees featured in Griffith’s article, Charles Wallendahl). The statistics about Teach First are interesting: following the charity’s launch 11 years ago s

Education and inequality: a tour from global to local, with some suggestions 14th January 2014 Glasgow Room, Harcourt Hill Campus All Welcome Danny Dorling joined the School of Geography and the Environment in September 2013 to take up the Halford Mackinder Professorship in Geography. He was previously a professor of Geography at the University of Sheffield. He has also worked in Newcastle, Bristol, Leeds and New Zealand, went to university in Newcastle upon Tyne, and to school in Oxford. Much of Danny’s work is available open access (see www.dannydorling.org). With a group of colleagues he helped create the website www.worldmapper.org which shows who has most and least in the world. His work concerns issues of housing, health, employment, education, wealth and poverty. His recent books include, co-authored texts The Atlas of the Real World: Mapping the way we live and Bankrupt Britain: An atlas of social change.

14 January 2014 Influencing policy? The example of religious education Revd Dr John Gay, Dr Janet Orchard (Bristol University) and Dr Alis Oancea 17:00 – 18:30, 15 Norham Gardens, OUDE, Seminar Room J Convened by Dr Alis Oancea and Dr Liam Gearon,  Religion, Philosophy and Education Research Forum 6 th  March 2014 A dialogue between phenomenology and realism in pedagogical and educational research A symposium supported by the Higher Education Academy, featuring Professor Margaret Archer, Professor Tone Saevi, and Professor David Scott 09:30 – 16:00 
15 Norham Gardens,OUDE, Seminar Room A, by prior booking only (via the HEA website) http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/events/detail/2014/Seminars/Social_Sciences/GEN810_oxford Conveners: Dr Alis Oancea and David Aldridge (Oxford Brookes) 8 April 2014 A lifeworld perspective on learning for the professions Prof Gloria Dall’Alba 17:00 – 18:30,  15 Norham Gardens, OUDE, Seminar Room D With its grounding in phenomeno